ity on points of professional duty, imitated by few
and excelled by none. His manly spirit disdained that slavish
obsequiousness by which too many of his episcopal brethren paid homage
to the narrow prejudices and state-jealousies of an imperious mistress,
and it soon became evident that strife and opposition awaited him.

His first difference was with archbishop Parker, whom he highly offended
by his backwardness in proceeding to extremities against the puritans, a
sect many of whose scruples Grindal himself had formerly entertained,
and was still inclined to view with respect or pity rather than with
indignation. Cecil, who was his chief friend and patron, apprehensive of
his involving himself in trouble, gladly seized an occasion of
withdrawing him from the contest, by procuring his appointment in 1570
to the vacant archbishopric of York; a hitherto neglected province, in
which his efforts for the instruction of the people and the reformation
of the state of the church were peculiarly required and eminently
successful.

For his own repose, Grindal ought never to have quitted this sphere of
unmolested usefulness; but when, on the death of Parker in 1575, the
primacy was offered to him, ambition, or perhaps the hope of rendering
his plans more extensively beneficial, unfortunately prompted its
acceptance. Thus was he brought once more within the uncongenial
atmosphere of a court, and subjected to the immediate control of his
sovereign in matters on which he regarded it as a duty, on the double
ground of conscience and the rights of his office, to resist the fiat of
a temporal head of the church.

The queen, whose dread and hatred of the puritans augmented with the
severities which she exercised against them, had conceived a violent
aversion to certain meetings called prophesyings, at this time held by
the clergy for the purpose of exercising their younger members in
expounding the Scriptures, and at which the laity had begun to attend as
auditors in great numbers and with much interest. Such assemblies, her
majesty declared, were nothing else than so many schools of puritanism,
where the people learned to be so inquisitive that their spiritual
superiors would soon lose all influence over them, and she issued
positive commands to Grindal for their suppression. At the same time
she expressed to him her extreme displeasure at the number of preachers
licensed in his province, and required that it should be very
consider